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Many psychological terms have undergone substantial changes in their definitions in the past few decades to include and encompass a wider variety of human experiences. Nick Haslam, a professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, created the phrase "concept creep" to describe the horizontal and vertical expansion of mental illnesses and negative affect terms such as abuse, bullying, trauma, addiction, and prejudice. Vertical expansion refers to broadening a term to include less severe or extreme forms of the original condition. For example, a term like "trauma" which might have originally referred only to extreme events like life-threatening accidents could now also include milder experiences, such as significant emotional distress. Though allowing for the encompassing of a wider range of experiences, this risks making the definition less specific. Horizontal expansion, on the other hand, involves stretching out these principles to new types of experiences or situations. This is visible in many different psychological domains. For example, the term "abuse" was first used to describe physical or sexual injury, but it is now used to cover emotional abuse and neglect. Similarly, bullying used to refer solely to physical aggressiveness between children. Now it encompasses social exclusion and behaviour in the workplace.

These changes reflect the liberal mindset to recognize and treat different diseases and sufferings while raising sensitivity and even awareness of harm. However, it is important to note, that concept creep bears the risk of pathologizing common occurrences and creating a victim mentality, while simultaneously advancing morality and social inclusion. To fully understand the growing definitions of negative affect terms and their development in recent real-world occurrences, Haslam's idea of concept creep is extremely important. Look at how well vertical and horizontal expansion are shown by the more general focus on mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is now often acknowledged that feelings of stress, loneliness, and isolation are mental health issues that need to be addressed. In the past, these experiences would have been written off as typical emotional reactions to a crisis, not requiring medical attention.

My personal experience of a term being expanded horizontally (when the umbrella for a term/diagnosis is expanded to cover more experiences) comes from my days back in high school. As my GCSE exam season was fast approaching, my school’s Senior Leadership team would present assemblies for Year 11 students en route to sitting our GCSE exams to talk us through how to deal with exam stress, or rather, as they called it, “anxieties” about exams. Every slideshow was titled with something along the lines of “What to do when you are experiencing anxiety mid-exam?” This created a false perception that whenever we (understandably so) were worried, or had nervous butterflies in our stomachs before sitting an exam, during the exam, or even whilst studying, those were symptoms of anxiety. Within the span of one week, an entire cohort of high school students had anxiety. Just as Haslam describes, “anxiety” had expanded to take on the experiences of high school students being (rightfully) nervous about exams. It is yet an example of constructivism, as in concept creeps follows the idea that most human ideas and products are the result of social human activity, nurture rather than nature, wherein we stretch out experiences of stress into a disorder. Although concept creep helps people recognize harm more clearly, it also produces a culture where typical feelings are pathologized and are made harder to distinguish between everyday struggles and clinical disorders.